Pull Tab Cloud Card

Interactive cards are a lot of fun! It’s so satisfying to play with them after finishing creating. I’ve made a few types of interactive cards – mostly shakers but I’ve also done a slider as well as a spinner card. Today I had a go at another type of interactive card – a pull tab card!

My starting point was the rainbow piece. I took a snippet of watercolour paper and, with the help of my MISTI, stamped and clear heat embossed my sentiment using Lawn Fawn’s Claire’s ABCs. I then trimmed the strip to ensure the sentiment was well centred. I created a mask so that I could colour a stripe at a time, then ink blended a colour at a time to create the rainbow. I was aiming for a fairly smooth transition, but the colours weren’t overly cooperative. (That’s what comes of using cheap, no-name inks, I suppose!) I then buffed the ink off of the lettering to help it pop.

The next step was creating the clouds. I used Lawn Fawn’s Simple Puffy Clouds dies and cut out lots of clouds in each size. I used white card, white/cream shimmer card, and white vellum. With the clouds ready I started to create my cloud panel. First I adhered one of the largest white clouds to the top of the rainbow, then laid the rainbow onto my card base (which is also made of shimmer card) to act as a guide for how to position the other clouds. I cut a panel of white card to be the base for the clouds, then randomly arranged them to cover it. I used Tombow Multi Mono Liquid Glue to adhere them in place.

Setting my cloud panel aside I got to work on applying foam tape to the card base so that my pull tab would be able to move. I created a channel that it could move through, and made it slightly narrower at the top which, combined with an extra width of card at the bottom of the rainbow, meant that the rainbow tab would not pull all the way out. I then laid my cloud panel in place to ensure everything was correctly covered.

At that point I realised that there was no way of a recipient knowing that they should pull on a cloud to make a rainbow! I decided to add the word “pull” onto the cloud using the same Claire’s ABCs stamps. I heat embossed it in clear so that it would be subtle. I then laid the rainbow panel into its channel, removed all the backing paper from the foam tape, and pressed the cloud panel into place over the top. After trimming away any overhanging parts of clouds, and of course having a few test runs, it was finished!

I’m reasonably pleased with how this turned out. It’s not perfect, but it worked well enough considering it is my first attempt at this kind of card. I feel like the front is a little boring before the cloud has been pulled up, but I guess that adds to the fun of it! I probably should have used two layers of foam tape though, because the movement is a little bit tight.